We were planning a pretty quiet Christmas, having had all the kids and their signifcant others here for Thanksgiving. We were thinking it would just be Bill, me, and our youngest, Lorna.
On December 24 I was just finishing writing this JWN post when who should come clattering up the stairs to my office but my elder daughter and her husband, who had just made the 7-hour drive from New York to come here for a surprise visit. How fabulous! We spent three days luxuriating in being together.
Saturday evening we had some good friends over and played some excellent rounds of charades after dinner. Sunday, the five of us opened our presents under the tree … I dashed off alone to Quaker meeting, which was a good one… we all spent a bunch of time cooking together and eating. (One vegetarian, two fishetarians, two carnivores… the food just piles up.)
We also spent a bunch of time doing crosswords (the daughters), competing at cut-throat Perquackey (Bill and I), and playing a little more gently a couple of good free-form Scrabble variants that we all enjoy. I think we all prefer the free-form variants over the real thing at this point. Real Scrabble just feels too darn ponderous.
I even decided to put good instructions for them over at Wikipedia. Here and here.
4 thoughts on “Good times at Christmas”
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Testing the comments-posting software here. (It still seems to be on the fritz?)
Here’s another test…. with best wishes for the upcoming year!
This year, I hope to meet you in person!
You say in your sidebar that you are Quaker, but you celebrate Christmas? I was always taught that Quakers did not celebrate such holidays…oh well.
Happy holidays belatedly
Nouri
Hi, Nouri. Thanks for the greeting! You’re kind of right about the way Quakers view the idea of a “liturgical calendar”. I wrote a bit about that here. The meeting for worship we held on Sunday 12/25 was just the normal Sunday (or as we say “First Day”) worship… As always, it was totally unprogramed and almost nothing was spoken. But very powerful!
However, as I said (not very elegantly) in that earlier post, we Quakers of today do live in the surrounding culture, unlike for example the earliest Quaker colonists who came here to north America who by and large established their own villages and towns. So many of us have let some of the December observance of Jesus’s birth business rub off on us.
Additionally, I grew up an Anglican. I really love Christmas carols, and still do. In my Quaker meeting we do sing some– not during the unprogramed worship sessions, but in other gatherings.